All this week long, as part of our ongoing Shame Issue, ELLE.com will be digging into the uncomfortable, unacceptable, and universally human emotions that keep us down. Hopefully, by addressing these issues, we can make strides in banishing those feelings of guilt, fear, and not-enoughness. Here's to just letting. It. Go.

Crippling shame, burning shame, curdling shame.

For many years, this was my calling, my métier. There were nights I couldn't go out as I felt too exposed in my ghastliness. There was creative work I couldn't finish or make public because it seemed too shameful to imagine I had something to say. There were mornings after even a few drinks when I had to squint my inner eye for protection as I looked, with only a glance (which was all I could bear), at the reflection of myself conversing the previous night. There I saw terrible, mortifying, shrill, shrewish, aggressive behavior—a video of a buffoon without rhythm dancing in bright light with the sound on mute.

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If I flirted with a man who wasn't interested in me, my cheeks later would burn. When even flirting with a man who did like me, I experienced afterward an egregiously vulnerable, phony, and dreadfully shame. I knew everyone had what we were taught to think of as flaws, but in others I saw some redemption (her legs are fat, but the space above her knees is so nicely tapered!); for me, there was no redemption. My cellulite, both actual and metaphorical, seemed categorically worse than other people's. More horrifying, more wrong.

Setting aside for a moment the complex, unstable answers to the question of why I spent much of my life so encumbered, one thing is certain: In the twenty-first century, feeling this way, being overcome by the sense of an essential not-okay-ness, is considered absolutely, 100 percent not okay.

As shame and vulnerability self-help superstar Brené Brown has declared, shame is the swampland of the soul. There are a number of mental health professionals who've exported the close examination of this aspect of the human condition (I use the word aspect to avoid a narrow definition, because shame is an event, an emotion, a mind-body meltdown) from the quiet containment of the psychiatrist's office to the wider, self-improvement public stage.

But it's the "researcher-storyteller" Brown, as she defines herself, who is arguably the midwife of the movement. In addition to her TED Talks—"Listening to Shame" (2012) has been viewed more than 5 million times, and her first TED appearance, 2010's "The Power of Vulnerability," had 20,301,052 views as of this writing—she's published four books on the subject and its correlates. Her latest (and much anticipated) effort, out this month, is Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. (Brown was born, raised, and works in Texas, at the University of Houston—hence the rodeo-redolent title.)

Rising Strong jumps off from the ideas in her first book, self-published as Women & Shame, then revised and later put out by Gotham, retitled I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't). In it, Brown unpacked the results of interviews she conducted with hundreds of women (she embraces male shame in her later work) that revealed what she describes as a "silent epidemic of shame," wherein women from all walks of life often feel there's something deeply wrong with them because they fail to meet the expectations they, and the world, set for themselves. She exhorted readers to have the courage to risk the vulnerability and exposure that facing down shame, in ourselves and others, entails—and continued to encourage them in her more recent book, Daring Greatly, which she leveraged into a trademarked mode of therapy, The Daring Way.

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I first stumbled across Brown when, during a desultory Web search, her second book turned up, the best-selling The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. As a shame sufferer par excellence, I was drawn to the promise in her message: You should go to bed content with yourself, regardless of what you did or didn't accomplish, ate or didn't eat, said or didn't say.

But in Rising Strong, she wants to make it clear that a "forgive yourself, move on!" approach is not enough. To live a truly authentic life, you need to slow down and "rumble" with your shame.

If you are "in shame," you are more likely to become defensive and angry. (Brown speaks in the irksome language of the psychodynamic/addiction/self-help world. But in using the same phrasing we use to describe being "in love," she seems right to me here, because it's an equally enveloping and multifarious condition.) The feelings are so intolerable, you're unbearable to yourself, so you then become unbearable to other people, instinctively taking protective measures—either by lashing out, plotting elaborate retaliations in your mind, or withdrawing.

Because I am, as Brown puts it, "hustling for [my] worthiness" rather than trusting in my inherent value, even a minor scheduling conflict can enrage me. If I'm running late, which I often am because it's hard for creatures of shame to leave the house, I find myself despising the person I was looking forward to meeting for lunch only a day ago, as though her very existence, her once-pleasing availability, was the cause of my internal torment.

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If being late to a lunch date didn't tap into a wellspring of fundamental inadequacy, I might feel mildly guilty but not deeply off. Although some people believe guilt and shame sit on the same continuum, Brown follows the widely received notion that guilt is the sense that one did something bad (and so can correct one's actions), whereas shame is the feeling that one just is bad.

If you agree with this distinction, you might say, for example, that it was shame that made me, in my early twenties, like so many women of my generation, bulimic, but that it was guilt (along with therapy and meditation) that cured me: With hunger in the world, I knew it was unethical to waste food because of Western neurosis.

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For Brown, making yourself vulnerable—to failure, emotions, dependence—is the only way to move from shame to, though she wouldn't say guilt, at least a healthy sense of responsibility. But vulnerability requires, by definition, that you expose yourself—that is, disarm yourself. When you're convinced that your true self is best kept hidden, the last thing you can do is be vulnerable.

In Rising Strong, she sets forth a strategy to make use of your "shame pockets" (and I want to pause for a moment to simply note, simply be aware of, how exhausting it is to always have to make use of everything!), rather than gingerly skirting around them, by harnessing the instinctive human urge to tell stories.

Brown explains how neurologists are discovering that we actually get a dopamine hit when we can click incidents in our lives into a familiar narrative pattern. People tell themselves the story they've grown comfortable with, which can confirm a sense of unworthiness and thus protect them from having to take risks.

So, whenever you find yourself in a rage and suspect it's because of a shame trigger, you need to write down the story you're telling yourself, to bring it to the conscious fore. You analyze it and then, hopefully, you don't act out, but act vulnerable instead.

It's much easier to rumble when it's mostly just between you and yourself, but when it involves revealing yourself to someone else, it's harder—and, surprisingly, opening an ear to someone else's underlying shame can be altogether grueling. Inspired by Brown, who's at her best when telling revealing stories about her marriage, here's an example from my own marriage. My husband and I often get in fights when I have a scheme for something I want to accomplish, and he feels put upon and won't help. Recently, the project was to design and build a cat-scratching post using a small early–Art Deco rug I'd found on the street. As I pressed him for help, because he's far better at building things (I'm theoretically DIY but actually quite spatially impaired), he became increasingly irate. I was taking the whole day up with this pointless project, he didn't know how to construct a cat scratcher, and, basically, why couldn't I just leave him alone?

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I went to our room (which, tellingly, after 14 years I still think of as my room) and cried, vowing revenge: I'd make it alone, I didn't need to #LeanInTogether—in fact, I didn't need him for anything. Because I'd just read Rising Strong, I recognized myself telling a story. This might not, on the surface, seem like a shame situation, but as Brown points out, often when we find ourselves in vengeance or rage mode, we're covering up shame.

In this case, the story I'd made up was that my husband was a selfish, consumerist jerk who didn't share my superior values to reuse, create, and overcome made-in-China vileness through handicraft and art. Worse, he was using me as a foil; he was in a bad mood and wanted me to be the problem, so he could evade his own shame.

Now, the latter part of this story is true, but the former isn't. My husband grew up poor and hates buying stuff; even though he's successful and makes a good salary, if it weren't for me, he'd be sleeping on milk crates and wearing castoffs. But why, anyway, was I telling myself this? Because it was easier to hate than to look beneath. What I was too ashamed to say to my husband was that making the cat scratcher alone made me feel intensely lonely, because it took me back to when I was little and couldn't ever quite get the help I needed from my family.

My parents, who both worked, expected me to walk to day care or home by myself from the time I was five, which, as an aware little mind who knew of kidnapping and criminals, made me very, very scared. My mom and dad did play with me and read to me before bed, but I had a hard time making friends, and they mostly thought children should entertain themselves. They were frustrated with how clingy I was. When I was 9, 10, 11, I often went to sleep crying because my parents refused to remove the monstrous two-inch wolf spiders that routinely found their way into my room. When I worked up the courage to catch them myself, in my panic I'd often snap off one of their thick, hairy legs where the upside-down yogurt carton clamped down on the cardboard I'd shoved under the spider. To this day, that memory sickens me.

But of course, way before that, there was me as a baby, crying for food, and my mom, dazed and overwhelmed. Because she's an incredibly evolved person (usefully, a therapist), she acknowledges that when I was an infant and my brother was two, she would go into near fugue states at the gaping maws of our constantly hungry "tiny bird mouths." Because, again, way before that there was her mother, who was told not to feed her infant off schedule, which led to my mother developing rickets from malnutrition.

My grandmother, unfulfilled, stuck in the house in the claustrophobic '40s and '50s with a philandering, narcissistic husband, shamed my mother as she got older: "You're going to school wearing that? You look awful." A tone I would echo as a teenager—"Mom, you look so stupid"—a viper tongue that would lead my parents to view me as simply evil, and I would, and still somewhat do, believe this to be true.

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So beneath my need for help with the cat scratcher is a cycle of shame originating in the deepest shame of all: that my vast, maybe inexhaustible need for help will make people reject and close themselves off to me, as my parents did.

What I tell myself now, when I don't get the help I need, is that I want a divorce, but Brown would have different advice. I should confess to my husband the reasons behind my wish for help and also listen with a large and open heart, rather than a clenched and shrunken one, to his own equally vexed story behind his refusal to help.

Doing this really does, as Brown says, take courage. I've got little stomach for it. Maybe I can make myself vulnerable once, but if I don't get a response I like (which is much of the time), I don't, as do the people who impress Brown, "keep being brave and feel [my] way through it."

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Still, in gaining tolerance for this kind of true intimacy and keeping at it, however haltingly, one can, one does, accrue more emotional wins, so I appreciate and respect that Brown is fulfilling her stated career goal of starting "a global conversation about vulnerability and shame."

Unfortunately, a reader begins to question just how meaningful these discussions are when they fit so neatly into the language of management-ese and the lucrative corporate-lecture circuit. Brown presents all shame as equivalent, from a family managing addiction to an advertising executive failing to protect his team from an exploitative client. She often refers to a Theodore Roosevelt quote: "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly." The carmaker Cadillac, inspired by Brown's work, swiped the phrase 'Daring Greatly' for its latest ad campaign and used the same Roosevelt quote, to her dismay. It seems cruel, considering Brown's belief in authenticity, but not surprising. Her universal, aspirational appeal pushes her onto the slippery ground between sharing and selling. Despite her knack for turns of trademarkable phrase—not only is the Daring Way trademarked, but so is her subcategory slogan "Show up, be seen, live brave"—Brown does fight the urge to simplify, asserting that these are complex issues. The tension between the catchphrases and the complexities, though, risks twisting her books right into threads in the webs of shame in which she sees us caught. (Is doing things the "daring way" going to be just another thing the overwhelmed woman fails at?)

I'm also not sure I'm ready to demonize shame to this extent, even though I felt such a victim of it for so long. This winter, after a hard and sad move, and a sad death, I came down with what I called "I don't care–itis." At my forty-fourth birthday party, I looked around and asked my dinner guests if they felt detached and weren't necessarily unhappy but no longer really cared about anything, and they mostly looked baffled and said no. I was surprised, and I began to realize that I had what's known in clinical circles as anhedonia—an inability to get pleasure from that which had always given me pleasure. It was unfamiliar to me because in its affectlessness it had nothing in common with my old, writhing, shame-soaked downward spirals.

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Luckily, I reemerged, but the experience changed me. I'm no longer beset by shame to the same degree. Maybe it's all just hormonal shifting, but I like to think my brain learned from the detachment and is holding on to it. Mostly, I'm glad for this dramatic personality reset because it makes life easier, and I'm a little bit nicer and less self-involved, but here's the thing: Sometimes, I miss my shame.

I'm surprised that I would miss this piece of myself. After years of thinking that if it weren't for shame, I'd be ambitious and not perpetually stalled and crippled, I probably accomplish as much now as I did before. It's with slightly less anxiety and slightly less judgment, but I don't feel as alive, or as connected with the world, now that it can't hurt me in the same way. It's like love and marriage, in the way that the stabbing, heart-racing-ness of courtship love (and the shame of one's desires and needs being exposed) fades into (on the good days) a happy, quiet hum.

Shame, unresolved, came with lots of good things. In my life, I've gravitated to perfectionists who have a relentless intellectual rigor and from whom I've learned to write, be a better friend, be more creative, and generally be smarter. I suspect that if I hadn't been used to feeling "not as good as," I'd probably have been scared of them. Instead, my friends represent to me a reassuring maintenance of standards in a crappy, lazy, self-indulgent world (even if I often have to put myself in the crappy, lazy, self-indulgent sector).

In some ways, I even like the texture that a shaming boss adds to the day. It's possibly preferable to the fantasy held out by Brené Brown of a workplace that operates on acceptance of emotions. I'm not sure any of that could be truly real, or lasting. Eventually, many of the same insecurities and pathologies would be operating, but just masked with different language.

I agree with Brown that there's no such thing as healthy shame, just as there's no such thing as healthy Momofuku Milk Bar confetti birthday cake, leftovers of which I chipped away at while writing this. Refined sugar, like shame, is certainly the white devil, in its production and its consumption. But even if we banished it, humans would find a way to invent its equivalent.

Let's not forget Freud, who saw the origins of shame as a reaction to our forbidden sexual attraction to our fathers or mothers. Even if you can't possibly take this literally (I haven't ruled it out), the idea behind it is important. There are uncontrollable drives within us that, regardless of what measures of understanding we were brought up with, will make us do things or feel things we want to stuff out of sight.

In the Old Testament, the word for our external sex organs and shame was the same: pudenda. The lexigraphic overlap isn't merely religious prudery; it's our first attempt to grasp that the discord, in all its terrible mystery, between our bodies telling us or showing us what we want (outside our conscious dominion) and what we should want, is life.

School me, mortify me, make me feel inferior so I can secretly feel superior. Gossip about me; let me gossip about you. Let's be bad, so we can feel bad about it alone, and then we can feel bad about it together!

I would argue with Brown's assertion that empathy is the antidote to shame; I would argue that the antidote is pride. I once told a professor that I was terrified I wouldn't finish a paper I was writing on the Dada photomontagist Hannah Höch, whom I love and thus wanted to say something incredibly brilliant about, because of my shame at not being a smart enough or good enough writer to do this. He said, quickly, "You will. You have too much pride not to." It surprised me by being true. Pride might not have been as healthy a motivating force as the self-compassion I dutifully practice now, but it was as effective and...fiercer.

I probably felt more appalled by myself in my twenties and thirties precisely because my drives were stronger. Where there is difference, and desire, there's probably shame. I'll advise you, from my postshame perch, that you can rumble with it, but you should also revel in it. If you don't think you deserve to revel in it, let's be friends. I like you.